Setting up: Claude Code, a folder, and a repository

This page is for readers who have never opened a terminal and would like to try what the rest of this section describes. It assumes nothing. If you already use Claude Code, skip to the next page.

What David actually used

The author of the novel this site documents, David, did all of this from a terminal window on a Mac, using the Claude Code command-line tool. He was on the largest individual plan, the 20x Claude Max subscription. This was an expensive process. Ten days of drafting, review fan-outs and unattended runs used a great deal of that plan’s allowance, and the transcripts show him rationing the most expensive model partway through. David thinks he could do it more cheaply a second time, now that the rules and tools exist and the false starts are known, but he doesn’t think he could have done it this way from scratch on a Pro plan. Anyone budgeting for something similar should expect the cost to be dominated by the checking and the discarded drafts rather than by the prose that survives. His novel was a folder of plain text files in Markdown format, kept under git version control. Every conversation in the transcripts on this site happened inside that folder. That is the setup the transcripts show. It is not the only one that works, and for most people starting today it is probably not the easiest.

The easier route: the desktop app

Claude Code also comes as a desktop application for macOS and Windows, with a Linux version in beta at the time of writing. It runs the same engine as the command-line tool, so everything on this site applies to it, but it does not require a terminal. You open a project folder in it, type in a chat panel, and review the changes it makes to your files visually. It can handle git for you if you ask. For someone whose interest is the writing rather than the tooling, this is the version to start with. It is available from https://claude.ai/code.

The one thing you give up is that the command line makes it slightly easier to run the small scripts described in the checks page. In practice the model writes and runs those for you either way, so the difference is smaller than it sounds.

What you need

An account with Claude Code access. At the time of writing that means a Claude Pro or Max subscription, a Team or Enterprise plan, or pay-as-you-go API credits through the Claude Console. The free tier does not include it. Plan names and limits change, so check https://claude.com/pricing rather than trusting this page. Usage is metered in rolling windows, and a project like this one runs through a good deal of it, which is why David used the 20x Max plan and still watched the budget.

A computer with a folder you can dedicate to the project. Nothing else. Git, the version-control tool, is usually already present on a Mac and can be installed on Windows from https://git-scm.com. If it is missing, Claude Code will tell you and can usually talk you through installing it.

Steps

1. Install Claude Code. For the desktop app, download it from https://claude.ai/code and sign in. For the command line, the current recommended installers are documented at https://code.claude.com/docs/en/setup and are a single command pasted into a terminal. On a Mac, the terminal is the application called Terminal, found with Spotlight search.

2. Make a folder for the project and open Claude Code in it. In the desktop app that means choosing the folder. In a terminal it means typing cd followed by the folder’s path, then claude. Everything the model does happens inside this folder unless you say otherwise.

3. Have your first conversation. Say what you want to make and ask the model to set the project up as a git repository with a short instructions file. Claude Code’s built-in /init command will draft that file, called CLAUDE.md, for you. The write it down page explains what should go in it. You do not need to know any git commands. Asking “commit what we have so far with a sensible message” is enough, and the model will do it.

4. Learn the permission prompt. Claude Code asks before it changes files or runs commands. On a subscription plan, its default mode approves the obviously safe actions itself and asks about the rest. If you find yourself approving everything, that is normal at first. A plan mode also exists in which the model describes what it would do without doing it, which is useful while you are learning to trust it. The modes are switched with Shift and Tab together, and documented at https://code.claude.com/docs/en/permission-modes.

5. Learn how to come back. Sessions end when you close the window. To pick one up later, the /resume command lists previous conversations, and from a terminal claude -c continues the most recent one in that folder. Even so, do not rely on this: a resumed conversation is not the same as a remembered one. Sessions on this project write their state to files for that reason, and the handoff page describes how to make a fresh session productive in a minute.

Where the transcripts on this site came from

Claude Code keeps a record of every session on your own computer, in a hidden folder in your home directory called .claude. Scripts generated the transcripts published here from David’s copy of that folder, then redacted and rendered them. If you want to do the same thing for your own project, the model can build the scripts for you, and the source of this site is public at https://github.com/DRMacIver/llm-fiction-case-study as a worked example. Be careful: those records contain everything, including the full text of every file the model wrote, so publish them only after checking what is in them.

If you get stuck

Ask the model. Claude Code can explain what a terminal is, why a command failed, and what a permission prompt means, and asking it costs nothing but a little of your usage. The first hour is usually the hardest, mostly because the surroundings are unfamiliar, not because the writing itself is hard.